Oliver Herring Opening

Oliver Herring's opening was packed with people who have participated in his TASK events where he solicits suggestions from the audience and then makes them perform the function. For this show he was working with teens who suggested "Make a knife, then kill someone." The resulting portraits are packed with a faux violence, like a late night horror movie.

But at the opening, everyone seemed friendly and unthreatening. He also had the best idea for an after-opening dinner. Outside a truck pulled up from Rickshaw Dumplings and dished out meals in plain white containers. Guests picked up the food then went back into the gallery for a fun sit down gathering.

Billy Sullivan Opening

Though I've been traveling a lot in recent years, I've still managed to keep some friends in New York. One of them is Billy Sullivan, the sweetest painter that I've ever met. Maybe, it's because he is a photographer too and teaches with me over at SVA's photo department. At his opening the other night, there were plenty of other friends of the artist including Joe Gaffney, Marilyn Minter, Mary Heilmann, and Elaine Reicheck. But the best friends were the subjects in his paintings who all showed up and peopled the opening as if the paintings had come alive. Actually, this was not much a stretch since Sullivan captured his models as if they were in mid conversation, fully spontaneous with real life.

Generous as he is, Sullivan also curated a group photography show in the smaller project room of the gallery. My favorite was an image of a chalk outline of human body on the wall by Dustin Wayne Harris, a former SVA student.

Dachshund Parade

The Dachshund version of the Whitney Biennial opening happens twice a year in Washington Square Park. Yesterday, there had to be over 200 doxies nuzzling each others' butts and occasionally playing with each other. Mostly, the dogs seemed pretty happy to meet others of their own kind, but since no dachshund is aware of its size--they all think they are bigger than they are--they probably would have been just as happy at a convention of Great Danes. Still, my dog Felix made friends...that is until he peed on a lady's handbag.

Back on track

I've taken a hiatus, but now I'm back on track because so much is happening in NYC right now, I can't stop commenting.

On Sunday, April 19th, I was at the benefit for Participant Inc. Totally fun, so I hope it raised lots of moolah for Lia Gangitano, the most self-sacrificing curator in town. My good friend Jim Dart did his bit, picking up my photo of Model UN which I showed at Partipant in 2006 as well as another photograph of a psychiatrist's office by Shelburne Thurber. The turnout was great, packed with Lia supporters, including Jay Gorney, collector Howard Morse, NYFA director Ted Berger and PS1 curator Klaus Biesenbach. But, as always, Lia stacked the crowd with artists--Laura Parnes, Kathy Burkhardt, Lovett and Codagnone, board president Adam Ames, Robert Boyd, and others. Performances by Kembra and Beaut, brought everyone back to the 1980s. The Pyramid Club isn't dead. It's just resting.

Anyone who thinks the China art market is over just needs to meet Yang Bin and Zhang Rui, the most visible collectors in Beijing. I had dinner with them, and about 15 other people, in Zhang's enormous, Guggenheim inspired, Mc Mansion on the northwest outskirts of Beijing last night. Neither seemed perturbed a bit by the downturn in the market, saying over and over again that this is a good opportunity to buy artists, especially younger artists. Yang Bin is about to open a humungous gallery and Zhang Rui is working on an art hotel, but as we chomped through course after course at this banquet, I kept thinking, "Are these guys on drugs?" Everyone here that I've met says, "NO!" They are still doing well, not feeling the pinch of these economic times, confident that the Chinese domestic market will continue to grow and bolster prices at least in the mainland. I can't wait to see if they are right.

This is a little glimpse of the sculpture by Taiwanese artist Huang Zhiyang. He had his opening last night at Pekin Fine Arts. In case you can't make it out, these are gold-leaf giant cocoons set on top of a black plexi base filled with flashing red LED signs. Doesn't that sound over the top?

At dinner after the opening, people were discussing the state of Chinese art, which is clearly past the pioneer stage but not yet into anything approaching maturity. I had spent Saturday running around different galleries and I was pretty disappointed. The best show I saw all day was the Hans Op de Beeck exhibition at Continua, an animation with beautiful drawings of his impressions of China. The worst show of the day was Qui Zhijie's installation at the Ullens Center, big, pompous and too much of everything to make much sense.

When are the Chinese artists going to take responsibility to make their work as good as possible? That's what I asked at dinner. Most blamed the west for choosing the wrong Chinese artists. Meg Maggio of Pekin Fine Arts argued that the generation who made it big in the west--those painters such as Liu Xiaodong or Zhang Xiaogang--were the last gasp of state artist system, playing the game with the Ministry of Culture types in order to have access to museum shows in China and trips abroad. She felt that something new was on the horizon. Obviously, the education system here has a lot of catching up to do as well, since teaching artists to critique themselves is not part of the vocabulary here. Meg has been dealing with the problem by showing more and more artists from Taiwan and Korea, in addition to young Chinese artists. I have to be careful not to be too New York centric when I approach the art I see here, but now that all the top Chinese artists are showing in New York, I am not sure it is so bad to apply the same standards that I use for all the other art I see. Hopefully, I'll find some new names on this trip that will give me more hope. Huang Zhiyang is not a bad start.

Colin Chinnery, newly appointed director of the ShContemporary art fair, thinks he can get New York dealers to sign up for the September event. I am not so sure, given that the fair did terribly last year and the overall fair-phobic atmosphere that has set in with the economic slowdown. We had lunch and discussed his plans--to be covered in detail in an upcoming piece in artinfo.com--and I was tickled by his enthusiasm and idealism. In China, even an art fair serves noncommercial goals, in this case, setting the ground work for more first rate contemporary art to get shown in this country where museums fall down on the job and galleries cannot take the risk. My question--why would foreign galleries take the risk, since there isn't yet a collector base here for foreign artists. Last year, the fair had any number of dealers from the US and Europe sitting around, trying to attract attention for artists that are well known in their hometowns but not at all understood in China. Most said they wouldn't repeat the mistake. But Colin is exceedingly bright and energetic, so if anyone can attract fair participants he should, with his way of making the whole thing sound more like a biennial than a market place.

Cold Night in Beijing

This corny picture of Tiananmen Square is not like anything I experience in Beijing. I arrived today and went straight to Pekin Fine Arts which will open a show of Huang Zhiyang tomorrow. More about that later....

Meg Maggio, Pekin Fine Arts owner, took me over to 798 where there was a party for the French Pavilion for the World Expo in Shanghai 2010. We ran into my friends, Zhang Fang and her husband Wang Qingsong, the artist. I just wrote a profile of Wang Qingsong for an upcoming issue of Art news. So we all went out to dinner at a restaurant called 3 Guys from Ghizou. Waiting on line for a table we ran into Leng Lin, director of Pace Beijing. It's all a small world in the Beijing art scene where everyone knows everyone and so far, everyone seems a lot more upbeat than in New York.

More Beijing art tomorrow, now to bed.

Time Sure Flies

I didn't realize how much time has passed since my last posting. But, it is a sign of how depressed everything has been over the past two months, that I have not been inspired to write. Overnight, the art world ground to a halt and the art magazines stopped returning emails. I've been at a loss to think of things to write about, since most of the shows I've been seeing have either been about apocalyptic disasters or seem woefully out of step with the times.

One bright spot--Elizabeth Dee's X Initiative--she'll be installing shows at Dia's old space on W. 22nd Street all year. But the real aim is to stimulate discussions about where to go, what to do, how to think about all that's happening right now. What is to be done? That question seems more on the money (excuse the expression since there is no money) than any of the pictures, paintings, sculptures, videos and installations on exhibition in Chelsea these days.

Holland Cotter wrote a column, "Long Live Art," this Sunday, basically saying that the best art occurs in a down market. It was uplifting, but a little rose-colored for me. I wish this will be the case, but right now things are a little scary. Let's see what happens.